Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism

INTRODUCTION

The story often has been told but never well explained. In June 1783, just months after the conclusion of the American War of Independence, the Religious Society of Friends, then ending its annual summer gathering in London, presented a petition to the House of Commons. Signed by 273 Quakers, this petition called for abolition of the British traffic in African men, women, and children. In the months that followed, a much smaller group of Friends gathered to compose and publish abolitionist texts and distribute those pamphlets across the nation. James Ramsay, an aging Anglican clergyman, seized on the opportunity in 1784 to describe in print what he had learned about colonial slavery during his twenty-five years on the British Caribbean island of Saint Kitts. Inspired by these examples, twenty-five-year-old Thomas Clarkson, then completing his studies at Saint John’s, Cambridge, came forward just two years later with a book that presented the British slave trade as a tragedy and a crime. The evident interest of William Wilberforce, the young member of Parliament for Yorkshire and a recent convert to Evangelicalism, encouraged these and other like-minded enthusiasts to launch a national campaign that would force a discussion in the House of Commons and galvanize antislavery sentiment that had circulated through British culture in recent years. This campaign, organized in the summer of 1787 under the stewardship of Granville Sharp (long a public opponent of human bondage), quickly caught fire—the preferred metaphor for observers in these months—so that by the spring of 1788 it seemed that the British public had declared, nearly in unison, that a pillar that long had sustained British wealth and power now must fall. Although the story is well known, it remains poorly understood.

The inspiration for this book lay in my confusion and frustration with this deceptively simple tale of origins. It grows out of a desire to explain the decisions to act, to make sense of the relation between cultural prescription and individual action. The British abolition movement that began in the 1780s did not follow inevitably from enlightened sensibilities, social change, or a shift in economic interests. Nor did it spring forth spontaneously, as an uncaused cause free from circumstance or context. Deeply contingent, the campaign had its roots in a distinct and distinctive moment in British imperial history, a moment that presented both unfamiliar challenges and novel possibilities to those preoccupied with the character and consequences of overseas enterprise. Yet, even then, fortunate circumstances alone did not lead inexorably to a coherent, organized attack on the slave trade, perhaps the most vulnerable link in the plantation complex. Initially the concerned pursued disparate objectives and launched uncoordinated initiatives, each of which reflected ambitions that extended beyond the problem of slavery and often originated in more parochial agendas. Each had as good a chance to fail as to succeed.

Moral Capital is a study of those tentative beginnings, an exploration of the period when antislavery efforts developed cautiously and haphazardly, without unifying purpose or preset goals, before individual initiatives coalesced into a movement. It treats the emergence in Britain of shifting definitions of imperial purpose, of new ways to conceive relations among subjects of the crown, and between overseas colonies and the imperial state. It opens for discussion the vital story of how the American Revolution reshaped British responses to colonial slavery, transformations rich with consequence for slave societies throughout the Atlantic world. And it explores the moment when various individuals and groups found through their challenge to the Atlantic slave trade an opportunity to establish new identities, new self-conceptions, to create for themselves a new place within society and a new role in public life. But most of all, this book is a meditation on the chasm that distinguishes moral opinion from moral action, the wide gulf that divides the mere perception of a moral wrong from decisions to seek a remedy. And it is a rumination on what happens in the space that lies between moral opinion and political action, what happens when moral purposes figure in political choices and when political actors, in turn, make use of moral causes.

It is one thing to notice an injustice and something else to act. For too long, the antislavery movement in Britain has been described as the consequence of shifts in moral perception, as if the mere recognition of a moral duty must have led men and women to act. It can be easy to forget what most of us know from our own lives: that professed values do not always determine the choices we make, that sometimes we decide against what we believe to be right, that we often accept questionable practices because they seem necessary to the world we know or because they enjoy the sanction of age, however troubling they may seem on careful reflection. Antislavery values were not enough in the eighteenth century, or after. The decision to act involved more than thinking of slavery as abhorrent, although clearly this was crucial. Somehow this particular moral wrong had to become important and urgent enough to drive individuals and groups to confront entrenched institutions. Because we have inherited the world that the abolitionists and their allies helped to make, we can overlook far too easily how unpromising antislavery projects looked on first contemplation, before the antislavery campaigns took shape. Appropriately, some commentators have placed great emphasis on the limits of the British antislavery movement: its selectivity, its shortcomings, what it failed to achieve. In appreciating this, though, we need also attend to the unlikely nature of the project, to the ironic fact that a movement of this kind could and did develop at the heart of what was, at the time, the largest slaving empire in the world.

[I]

The attempt to explain the history of antislavery has a history of its own. These stories, those accounts that others have told before, shape the character of mine. The first chroniclers found it difficult to think of the antislavery movement, the subsequent success of which later became essential to British national identity, as the result of mundane causes. Instead, they saw in it the hand of divine providence or the verification of a nobility ostensibly essential to the British character. Thomas Clarkson, an early organizer of the movement and its first historian, devoted himself in 1786 to urging the sympathetic but ambivalent to commit. He dedicated countless hours to gathering information and devising strategies that would give the concerned reason to act. Twenty years later, though, when the time came to tell the movement’s history, Clarkson avoided questions relating to motivation and purpose. He preferred instead to treat the progress of antislavery as a transcendental force that operated over the heads of the participants and drove them to a predestined end. Indeed, Clarkson explicitly ruled out the possibility that banal aims and motives could have been at work, that self-interest or self-concern could have helped give the movement life. Christian altruism, for him, provided a sufficient explanation. The abolition of the Slave-trade, he declared, took its rise, not from persons, who set up a cry for liberty, when they were oppressors themselves, nor from persons who were led to it by ambition, or a love of introduction reputation among men, but where it was most desirable, namely, from the teachers of Christianity in those times.¹

The originators, Clarkson explained, had been impelled by the spirit of gospel love. Their teachings operated as a slow and subtle influence on subsequent generations until the trickle of antislavery sentiment expanded into a torrent of antislavery opinion. In a graphic rendering of the process, Clarkson placed these early opponents at the headwaters, where their testimony fortified the shallow brooks of early antislavery witness. After 1750, the deepening tributaries of antislavery thought, swelled by the contributions of activists like Anthony Benezet and Granville Sharp, spilled into the narrow streams of moral commitment, giving them greater breadth and force. By 1787, the convergence of antislavery coadjutors—Quakers, theologians, philosophers, Evangelicals, even Thomas Clarkson himself—stretched the banks into rivers bloated by antislavery fervor that, finally, merged and emptied onto the political landscape, which Clarkson conceived as a flooded alluvial plain, swamped by the deluge of popular support for abolitionism.

From this parable about the inexorable growth of righteousness, Clarkson hoped readers would draw two morals. The greatest works must have a beginning, the veteran campaigner observed. However small the beginning and slow the progress may appear in any good work which we may undertake, we need not be discouraged as to the ultimate result of our labours. Second, and most important, no virtuous effort is ever ultimately lost. Clarkson described the process this way.

An individual, for example, begins; he communicates his sentiments to others. Thus, while alive, he enlightens; when dead, he leaves his works behind him. Thus, though departed, he yet speaks, and his influence is not lost. Of those enlightened by him, some become authors, and others actors in their turn. While living, they instruct, like their predecessors; when dead they speak also. Thus a number of dead persons are encouraging us in libraries, and a number of living are conversing and diffusing zeal among us at the same time.²

For those still engaged in the antislavery campaign when Clarkson published in 1807, his lesson was a counsel of hope, his invention of an Anglo-American antislavery tradition cause for solace. It taught that the individual act, however small, mattered, that choices ramify long after the moment of decision. It told canvassers to think of themselves as part of a lineage that stretched back generations and could extend forward for many decades to come. And it persuaded participants of the purity of their cause and, by extension, the purity of their participation in it.

Clarkson’s History would provide the framework in which, for more than a century, the origins of the British antislavery movement would be understood. Clarkson was the first to characterize the campaign as the working out of impulses deeply embedded in the society from which it emerged, as the elaboration of principles essential to British Protestantism, as the expression of a distinctively British devotion to liberty and the rule of law. Because the fundamental elements of an antislavery ideology, Clarkson implied, rested latent in Anglo-American culture, its evolution was predictable because it was inevitable, explicable because it was natural, much like rivers running to the sea. The campaign for the abolition of the slave trade demonstrated and proved that civilized peoples, like the British, could achieve moral progress. British primacy in the war against barbarism reaffirmed the nation’s place at the apex of refinement and virtue. The campaign represented a moment of transcendence, a heroic triumph superior to the petty, self-interested squabbles typical of conflicts between rival states. No evil more monstrous has existed upon earth, Clarkson’s friend

FIGURE 1. The Abolition Map. From Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1808), which depicts the growth of antislavery opinion in Britain and British North America during the eighteenth century. Courtesy, Alexander Library, Special Collections, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.

The left branch identifies theologians, philosophers, poets, dramatists, historians, and other intellectuals in Britain who raised questions about the Atlantic slave trade or colonial slavery. The middle branch marks key moments in the evolution of Quaker antislavery in the British Isles. A third branch, on the right, indicates the progress of antislavery organizing among Quakers in North America. A fourth branch, at the bottom and center, running from right to left, presents building antislavery opposition among Anglican Evangelicals.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge explained. The conquests of Napoleon and Alexander looked mean compared to the Immortal War against the slave trade.³ For Clarkson and his contemporaries, the origins of the antislavery movement needed no explanation because, to them, the campaign explained itself. Awakened, during the late eighteenth century, to the presence of a horrific injustice, a nation devoted to Christianity and liberty nobly united to rectify a great wrong.

This interpretive framework, what might be thought of as the Clarkson thesis, with its reliance on narration rather than explanation, with its emphasis on providential mission rather than human calculation, comported nicely with how most in Britain, deep into the twentieth century, preferred to reflect on the nation’s slave trading and slaveholding past. To late Victorian and Edwardian historians especially, what mattered about the antislavery movement were, not the origins, but its character and results. The regrettable years of avarice and exploitation, the old commercialism, thankfully lay in the past. Britain shared in the guilt with the other colonizing nations, the influential John Seeley acknowledged in his widely read Expansion of England of 1883. But Britain, unlike the others, acted nobly. We published our own guilt, repented of it, and did at last renounce it. That view, that insistence on the selfless quality of British actions, that record of redemption for past wrongs, took on special importance in the first half of the twentieth century, when anti-imperialists in Britain and nationalists in the colonies began to question the ends and means of empire. In this environment, the history of antislavery provided a compelling origin story for the modern empire as well as its ideological defense. It displayed Britain as the purveyor of civilization, justice, and order. It established the British state as concerned historically with the welfare of African peoples, even, it was noted, at a cost to itself. Even a casual consideration of this history, declared one account published in 1900, should give most Englishmen a patriotic thrill.⁴

For these reasons, a sustained probe into the origins of the antislavery movement could serve little purpose to the first generation of imperial historians. Reginald Coupland, Beit Professor of Colonial History and Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, participated actively in the promotion and defense of imperial trusteeship in India, Africa, and the Middle East on the eve of decolonization. His influential volumes treating British service to backward peoples aimed to honor the great tradition, not interrogate it. To the British celebrants in 1933 at the centennials commemorating emancipation, what mattered was eradicating the remnants of human bondage around the globe—this country’s greatest contribution to mankind—not the origins of the impulse to export antislavery values. To ask too deeply about beginnings was to ask about motives. And a question about motives might suggest that the motives, themselves, had been questionable. As a consequence, no alternative to Clarkson’s narrative emerged from British historians for more than a century. In tone and substance the governing interpretation of the antislavery movement changed little from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the beginning of World War II.⁵

To be sure, in the intervening years, the suspicious detected less honorable agendas. Advocates for the working classes in England in the early nineteenth century, William Cobbett most prominently, sometimes described the antislavery movement as a plot to distract attention from the enslavement of nominally free wage labor at home.⁶ On the other side of the political spectrum, skeptics and reactionaries rendered unsympathetic assessments of emancipation and emancipationists. The abolitionist leadership they denounced as quixotic knights-errant, as pious charlatans all too happy to ruin the empire with costly and disastrous experiments in social engineering for the good of an inferior race, critics like Thomas Carlyle wrote, unable to benefit from freedom. The heirs to the West Indian interest in the nineteenth century liked to accuse the Evangelicals of narcissism, of a fanatic infatuation with their own piety or, alternatively, of serving as a front for commercial interests hoping to promote sugar production in Cuba, Brazil, or India.⁷

Outside the British Isles, rivals often interpreted humanitarianism as statecraft in disguise. British attempts to suppress the slave trade looked like a conspiracy to destroy the plantations of European rivals or to shift world sugar production to British India or to violate national sovereignty. The Paris press read British-sponsored right-to-search treaties as pretexts to intercept French ships engaged in legitimate trade. Similar opinions prevailed among ardent nationalists in the United States inclined to view the British government as a self-righteous bully. In Cuba, planters regarded attempts to block the transport of slaves to the island as a stratagem designed to throw the sugar trade to Brazil, where British capital was heavily invested. Brazilians, in turn, suspected that slave trade abolition aimed not only to make the British Caribbean plantations more competitive but also to reduce the Lusophone presence in West and East African markets.⁸ A Machiavellian government, it seemed to very many, intended to achieve world supremacy under the cover of universal philanthropy. The self-congratulatory narrative, therefore, had its doubters. Critics across Europe and the Americas questioned Britons’ tendency to parade their purported humanitarianism.

The descendants of British Caribbean slaves, however, first made the perfidious Albion theme essential to how the British antislavery movement would be understood in the second half of the twentieth century. A resentment of economic dependency and an emerging fight for political independence, between World War I and World War II, led an emerging class of West Indian intellectuals to denounce constructions of the past that helped legitimate colonial rule. A pointed reevaluation of the humanitarian tradition followed as a consequence. Trinidad journalist C. L. R. James, then living in London, peppered his account of the 1938 Haitian Revolution with contemptuous asides on British duplicity during the Napoleonic wars. Eric Williams, who had studied with James as a schoolboy in Trinidad, enlarged on these themes in his classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944). The doctoral dissertation of 1938 on which Capitalism and Slavery was based had described economic change as a factor in the abolitionist victory of 1807. By 1944, though, Williams had decided that a proper history of British antislavery would emphasize the hypocrisy he thought pervasive in that campaign and by extension pervasive among its latter-day celebrants. In 1942 he had condemned the impact of colonial rule on the British West Indies in his first book, The Negro in the Caribbean. With Capitalism and Slavery, the future prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago hoped to demystify British humanitarianism by redescribing its founding era.⁹

Eric Williams offered two substantial revisions to the traditional account. First, he put the developing economic forces at the center of the story, reducing in importance the skirmishes in Parliament that traditionally received greatest attention from British and imperial historians. The abolitionists campaigned against the slave trade and slavery, Williams insisted, when it became economically convenient to do so. The value of the British sugar colonies, he argued, declined appreciably after the American Revolution. French, Cuban, and Brazilian plantations, increasingly, could produce sugar at a lower cost. As a matter of policy, abolition and emancipation presented less of a threat to the imperial economy in the early nineteenth century, Williams contended, than in the decades before. Ideologically, the abolitionist attack on the slave system was, at heart, an attack on monopoly, on the exclusive right of British Caribbean sugar producers to meet the demand of British consumers. The gospel of free trade, Williams suggested, mattered as much to the abolitionists as the gospel of Christ. Merchants and manufacturers in industrializing Britain increasingly sought access to the cheapest source of raw commodities, even if those sources lay outside the British Empire. The whole world now became a British colony, Williams wrote, and the West Indies were doomed. These transformations in economics and ideology proved decisive, Williams maintained. Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 to discourage the expansion of sugar cultivation. Emancipation in 1834 served as a kind of mercy killing for a dying colonial economy. The changing economic circumstances, in short, helped explain the otherwise inexplicable success of the British antislavery movement.¹⁰

Therefore, those historians infatuated with the heroism of the abolitionists, Williams declared, had substituted romance for facts. Although he accepted the importance of the antislavery movement, Williams questioned the integrity of prominent politicians traditionally associated with the cause. The younger William Pitt, prime minister from 1783 to 1801 and 1804 to 1806, was a particularly easy target. A professed opponent of the slave trade in the 1780s, he spent the nation’s wealth and blood in the 1790s on a fruitless mission to suppress the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue and to restore plantation slavery in the crumbling French colony under British control. Outside the halls of power, Williams continued, economic interests clothed in the garb of disinterested philanthropy predominated in the campaign for emancipation. Key figures in the movement, like James Cropper, who had invested heavily in East Indian sugar, needed the Caribbean plantations to fail. Moral inconsistencies abounded in British humanitarianism, according to Williams. The abolitionists encouraged the expansion of slavery outside the British Empire by promoting sugar, coffee, and cotton imports from plantations in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. At the same time, they neglected inhumanities closer to home, as radicals like Cobbett had argued a century before. Wilberforce was familiar with all that went on in the hold of a slave ship, Williams observed of the parliamentary leader of the antislavery campaign, but ignored what went on at the bottom of a mineshaft.¹¹ Here was the second revision to the humanitarian narrative. Not only did economics matter more than morals. The moralists were themselves often cynics or hypocrites.

These two claims, one about economics, the other about the abolitionists, touched off a prolonged controversy, perhaps one of the most complex in modern historical scholarship. At stake in this debate not only has been the character of the British antislavery movement. The controversy reflected deeper divisions regarding the role of capitalist interests in British imperial history, the relationship between the British and peoples of African descent, and the very possibility of humanitarian action in colonial societies. Initially, scholarly interest centered on the economic question, perhaps because this aspect of the problem seemed most susceptible to empirical analysis. What had become known as the decline thesis came under sustained attack during the 1960s and 1970s. This new generation of research made a powerful case for the recovery of the Caribbean economy after the American Revolution. Increasingly, it seemed unlikely that slave trade abolition in 1807 could be attributed primarily to the diminished value of the West Indian colonies as Eric Williams and many others had supposed.¹² But these findings only deepened the paradox that the abolitionists seemed to present. Capitalism and Slavery had forever stigmatized the humanitarian narrative. By the 1970s, few academic historians cared to write about selfless men engaged in a virtuous crusade. In the aftermath of decolonization, as the morality of empire became discredited, not many wished to revive an interpretive tradition associated with and implicated in colonial rule. Therefore, instead of returning to the humanitarian narrative, they sought new ways to relate the history of abolition to the dynamics of economic change. In this way, Capitalism and Slavery continued to influence the way investigators framed questions about the antislavery movement, even as the decline thesis fell from favor. How did the choices of the abolitionists reflect the interests of their class?¹³

This was an important question insofar as the character of the British antislavery movement was at issue. But to comprehend how abolitionism first took shape it has proved to be an unhelpful place from which to begin research. The history of the British antislavery campaign presents three related but distinct subjects: (1) the development of ideas and values hostile to slavery and the slave trade; (2) the crystallization of programs to reform or transform imperial and colonial policy; and (3) the achievement of abolition and emancipation. Each topic, it should be evident, presents a different set of interpretive problems. The first requires an exploration of changing values, perceptions, and beliefs. It recommends attention primarily to intellectual and cultural history. This I will refer to as the history of antislavery ideology. The second calls for an explanation of how those ideas translated into effective action as well as how and why those strategies took the character and shape they did. This topic, the subject of this book, is the history of abolitionism. The third demands an analysis of the political process. It requires an analysis of the forces and interests that led to political change. This is the history of abolition and emancipation.¹⁴ Each one of these subjects, of course, entails the others. The history of abolition and emancipation makes no sense without reference to the history of abolitionism. And abolitionism can be assessed properly only in the context of antislavery ideology. Nonetheless, as distinct topics they require distinct approaches. Too often the history of abolitionism has been presented either as a prologue to the history of abolition and emancipation or in terms more appropriate to the study of antislavery thought.

In the typical survey, for example, the early abolitionist stirrings represent a short chapter in a longer story. Brief descriptions of the first antislavery societies and capsule profiles of the initial activists introduce detailed explanations of how and why abolition and emancipation occurred.¹⁵ Those assessments less sympathetic to the abolitionists often start from a similar place. If Eric Williams took an interest in the character and the consequences of the antislavery movements, he wrote nothing at all about its origins. Capitalism and Slavery, in this respect, left the Clarkson thesis unrevised, a choice characteristic, too, in subsequent research emphasizing the importance of economic decline. In this way, the abolitionists have prevailed in more than one sense. Their story—the achievement of abolition and emancipation—has remained the subject of discussion and analysis. Most assessments, both sympathetic and critical, describe the efforts that turned the slave trade into a political issue in order to explain the process that led to abolition and emancipation. These brief descriptions, however, are not explanations. And it is the premise of this book that abolitionism, no less than abolition, requires an explanation. For this reason, it ends where most begin, with the founding of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787.

The scholarship on antislavery ideology encounters a different set of problems. Instead of making a long story too short, it often makes a complicated problem too simple. Most have been careful to acknowledge that climates of opinion do not give virgin birth to social movements.¹⁶ But the inclination remains to treat the antislavery campaigns as arising from climates of opinion. That tendency has been most prevalent in the study of Quakers and Anglican Evangelicals, the two groups most responsible for organizing the national campaign. The fit between antislavery values and their religious principles is well established. But why these groups waited to act until the 1780s or, alternatively, did not wait longer remains unexplained. The arguments tend to take the form of a tautology: Quakers became abolitionists because traditionally Quakers had religious objections to slaveholding; Evangelicals opposed slavery because of the imperatives arising from the Evangelical worldview.¹⁷

Comparable problems appear in less obvious ways in the work on antislavery and the culture of capitalism. An emerging faith in the virtue and efficiency of free labor helped the first abolitionists conceive alternatives to slavery, as David Eltis and Howard Temperley have proposed. The expansion of overseas trade may have helped the concerned recognize their connection to colonial slavery and, thereby, an obligation to intervene, as Thomas Haskell has suggested. But these ideological frameworks were conditions, not causes. If they predisposed, they did not dispose. The study of antislavery ideas is indispensable to understanding abolitionism. The research on the subject has illuminated key aspects of the abolitionists’ worldview. However, when the changes described are too broad, as in the rise of capitalism or the ascent of free labor ideology, we are left with answers that are subject to the same shortcomings as the Enlightenment or Evangelicalism, though less obviously idealist. We learn that certain individuals had certain ideas and that these ideas circulated extensively in the late eighteenth century but not what moved people to take specific initiatives at particular moments.

Understanding the foundations of abolitionism, then, means understanding human choices. And to understand human choices, the now conventional focus on the dynamics of economic change may, in fact, produce more problems than it solves. Almost thirty years ago, historian Howard Temperley expressed well the assumptions that have continued to recommend this route.

Here we have a system—a highly successful system—of large-scale capitalist agriculture, mass producing raw materials for sale in distant markets, growing up at a time when most production was still small-scale and designed to meet the needs of local consumers. But precisely at a time when capitalist ideas were in the ascendant, and large-scale production of all kinds of goods was beginning, we find this system being dismantled. How could this happen unless capitalism has something to do with it? If our reasoning leads to the conclusion that capitalism had nothing to do with it the chances are that there is something wrong with our reasoning.¹⁸

Temperley surely is correct. Capitalism undoubtedly had something to do with the antislavery movement in Britain. In practice, however, as a methodological imperative, this starting point has had the unfortunate effect of discouraging investigation into the other agendas and contexts that also had something to do with the emergence of abolitionism. Instead of asking how abolitionism began, most of these studies have asked how the history of antislavery movements related to the history of capitalism. As should be apparent, an answer to the second question does not, necessarily, offer a solution to the first. It took a peculiar historical conjuncture, as the historian Seymour Drescher once wrote, to push slave trade abolition to the top of the public agenda. But we still need a study of that peculiar historical conjuncture that does not assume, from the outset, that an explanation must begin with the rise of capitalism.¹⁹

In the most recent generation of research, the attention to class interest and class conflicts in the British antislavery movement served as a talisman to ward off the ghost of Coupland’s past, as one scholar has put it, as a kind of intellectual prophylactic designed to prevent future outbreaks of a romance with empire. It reflected a commendable desire to develop a less credulous assessment of abolitionist motives and aims. And that reluctance to emphasize the familiar heroes, and their heroism, has encouraged a broader understanding of what abolitionism entailed. The antislavery movement, we now know, involved far more than the small circle of propagandists and elite politicians whom the first chroniclers tended to lionize. Resistance by the enslaved, themselves, helped put the legality of slaveholding in Britain on trial in the English and Scottish courts in the 1760s and 1770s and helped diminish sympathy for Caribbean slaveowners, thereafter, especially following slave trade abolition in 1807.²⁰ A mobilized abolitionist public, moreover, helped ensure that the slave trade and slavery remained a political issue during the fifty-year campaign for their eradication.²¹ The success of the British antislavery movement depended on a wider variety of actors than the older studies tended to allow.

[II]

This is how things stood when I first became intrigued and then perplexed by the sudden emergence and public success of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade. The facts, as I understood them, made little sense. The British antislavery movement seemed to emerge from nowhere in 1787–1788. The breadth of its public support in those first heady months had few precedents in late-eighteenth-century British political history. Public opposition to the abolitionists was negligible.²² If the question could have been decided by public opinion, the slave trade would have been abolished at once. This is what happened, there seemed to be no question about that, but how could that have been? Antislavery movements do not just spontaneously appear, not previously, and not in this way. And even once Britain set the precedent, enthusiastic and unanimous support for antislavery action elsewhere in Europe and the Americas would be exceedingly rare. Moreover, for reasons that now should be clear, it was hard to see how the familiar explanatory categories—Enlightenment, Evangelicalism, Quakerism, capitalism, humanitarianism, and the like—could make sense of the sudden rise in political activism.

So I spent many, many months dissecting the first year of the campaign against the British slave trade. The logic that informed my approach was simple (if not simplistic). If I could chart the movement’s development month by month, even week by week, it might be possible to understand how the campaign emerged. If I could determine who participated in the movement, if I could characterize the hundreds of subscribers to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the thousands who signed antislavery petitions sent to the House of Commons in 1788, it might be possible to discern patterns in the public support for abolitionism. This research had its value. It established, among other things, the critical importance of Quaker networks and Quaker money during the first crucial months of the national campaign.²³ Yet the more material I gathered about the campaign in 1787 and 1788 the less satisfied I became with what I had uncovered. I understood, belatedly, that I had the stick by the wrong end. The interesting questions, and the truly difficult questions, were less about who and more about why. It might be possible, with enough patience, to determine with some precision who supported the campaign against the slave trade. Yet I would still not understand why, in the first place, there was an antislavery organization in the 1780s for those people to support.

Neither public opinion nor slave resistance, together or alone, originated the British antislavery movement, though both contributed decisively to its success. For more than a century, antislavery values in Britain and slave resistance in the colonies had proved unable, separately and together, to push the slave trade or colonial slavery to the top of the political agenda. The popular campaign of the 1780s was the product of conscious effort, not simply the efflorescence of antislavery sentiment. British mobilization would never have developed if particular individuals and groups had not conspired to create it. But why them? Why then? And why in this way? The morality of the slave system had troubled men and women for decades, but no one in Britain had attempted to overthrow it. Necessarily, then, and somewhat reluctantly at first, as this project developed, I found myself taking yet another look at the initial activists and organizers, the now familiar protagonists of the increasingly neglected and long-discredited humanitarian narrative, particularly Anthony Benezet, Thomas Clarkson, William Dillwyn, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah More, Margaret Middleton, John Pemberton, Beilby Porteus, James Ramsay, Granville Sharp, Phillis Wheatley, and William Wilberforce. An explanation of abolitionism, I decided, would have to begin with them. I would have to make sense of their concerns, their purposes, their choices, but, this time, in order to understand the abolitionists rather than to praise them.

The obvious point has to be made first, since its significance is sometimes overlooked. These men and women did not begin life as abolitionists. They could not assume, when they began their efforts, that abolishing any aspect of the slave system could be regarded as a plausible project. They were not abolitionists by nature, in essence, ontologically (though one may be forgiven for drawing that conclusion from several of their biographers). Instead, over the course of their lives they became abolitionists. Something in their experience of the world led them into active opposition to slavery. Much of this book is concerned with those moments of decision, with the fissures in experience that moved people troubled by slavery to act on their concerns. Throughout, I have tried to indicate how the decision to challenge slavery related to the broader needs and aims of particular actors, to the cultural, political, and even personal agendas that previous studies centered exclusively on their antislavery activities have tended to underplay or overlook. I have assumed that hostility to slavery reflected, arose from, and addressed matters of concern that, in key respects, had little to do with the problem of slavery. And I have tried to detail those situations that allowed antislavery to occupy a prominent place within this complex of aspirations and concerns. For this reason, I have read broadly if necessarily selectively on issues that, on their face, have limited relevance to slavery itself but that mattered a great deal to the particular opponents of slavery at the time. Simultaneously I have tried to locate the activities and publications of those who did attack human bondage in the context of their related interests and initiatives. It may seem as if the last thing needed is additional work on the first abolitionists. But the problem, I have come to realize, is less that they have received too much attention than that they have received too much of the wrong kind of attention. In writing this book, when dealing with the founding generation, one question has been paramount: when men and women in late-eighteenth-century Britain tried to organize opposition to some aspect of the Atlantic slave system, what were they trying to do?

As my various answers to this question will make clear, helping enslaved Africans often mattered far less to the opponents of slavery than more proximate and sometimes very different goals. Conventionally, self-interest has been defined in economic terms: the abolitionists were self-interested, the argument goes, because abolition and emancipation stood to advance the values and interests of their class. But not all interests are economic interests. Interest can take any number of guises. Men and women often fought slavery because they disliked what slavery wrought, because it affected colonial or metropolitan society in undesirable ways, or because it threatened cherished values. Often activists took up the issue of slavery less because they cared about Africans than because they regretted its impact on society, on the empire, on public morals, or on the collective sense of self. A few, to varying degrees, did take a genuine interest in the welfare of the enslaved. But many more wanted, above all, to be free of slavery, and thus free from danger or free from corruption or free from guilt. The self-concerned, self-regarding, even self-validating impulse in early British abolitionism represents a key theme in this book.

A second theme concerns the relevance of imperial contexts. No one in Britain could campaign against colonial slavery or the Atlantic slave trade without also confronting fundamental questions about the structure, character, and purpose of empire. How should the empire be governed? When and how should the imperial state intervene in colonial affairs? What responsibility does the British government have to captive and conquered peoples living in British territories? How do the interests of the individual colonies relate to the interests of the empire as a whole? Where does sovereignty lie? Where should it lie? In what ways should power be exercised? These vital questions, which most research on British antislavery has neglected or overlooked, went to the heart of the challenge facing the first abolitionists. Those questions perhaps were easy for historians to overlook in the 1970s, during the years when scholarly interest in the abolitionists revived, since, by then, research on the eighteenth-century empire had fallen into disrepair; by that time, the study of slavery had become a matter for colonial rather than British history. At the time, perhaps, it seemed more promising to regard antislavery in terms of Britain’s domestic history, as one result of the Evangelical revival or as an instance in the history of political reform or in the campaign’s relationship to industrialization, rather than as a problem in imperial relations. But, for the origins of abolitionism, what mattered more than these domestic contexts, what accounts for the timing of the movement, the urgency the subject acquired, as well as its initial public success were the conflicts between colonial and metropolitan elites that commenced with the Seven Years’ War and ended with American independence, the conflicts that forced the British to make sense of their increasingly global empire.

Eric Williams may have been wrong on some points. But he was right to describe the American Revolution as a pivotal event in the history of British slavery. The conflict of the 1760s and 1770s directed unprecedented attention to the moral character of colonial institutions and imperial practices. In North America, the rebellion against imperial authority fostered new interest in dramatic displays of individual and collective virtue. In Britain, it generated attempts to enhance, and justify the enhancement of, authority over the American colonies. Much of this book is concerned with how early abolitionist and emancipationist programs served broader efforts to validate (or question) the moral authority of elites in both British America and the British Isles. The British would discover in the course of this conflict what in the nineteenth century they came to recognize as a truism. Support for slavery could become an embarrassment if and when the virtue of imperial rule became a public question. At the same time, moral capital might be accrued by framing antislavery initiatives as an emblem of the national character. The American Revolution did not cause abolitionism in Britain. It neither moved men and women to act nor indicated what, specifically, they should do. The crisis in imperial authority did, however, make the institution of slavery matter politically in ways it had never mattered before. It turned the slave system into a symbol, not just an institution, the source of self-examination as well as a fount of wealth. Scholars inclined to emphasize British humanitarianism early in the twentieth century tended to present the emergence of abolitionism as a vindication of British liberty. In the process, they obscured the crisis in British liberty that made its vindication necessary.

That crisis in Anglo-American relations, however, suggested a number of possible responses. The path to abolitionism was less linear, more crooked, than has been supposed. It was marked by false starts, routes not taken, initiatives that petered out. A third purpose of this book is to suggest the complexity of this history and to elucidate the process that made slave trade abolition, above all others, the preeminent goal. In Thomas Clark-son’s graphic depiction, antislavery opinion flows in one direction, without eddies or crosscurrents, without a diversity in aim, agenda, or interest. In this interpretation, the opponents of slavery all wanted the same thing, and for the same reasons. The agenda was foreordained. The strategy was clear. The attack on the slave trade would come first. In time, when the time was ripe, the challenge to slavery itself would follow. Every work published since, in one form or another, has implicitly accepted this model. In the process, these works have quietly discarded a problem essential to understanding the foundations of the antislavery movements in Britain. Before the late 1780s, there was no consensus on how best to proceed. No one, at first, knew exactly what to do. The eventual focus on the slave trade, like the movement itself, was an artifact of history. It matters a great deal, then, that the first impulses toward reform were ameliorationist rather than abolitionist or emancipationist, that activists often aimed to make slavery more humane or more Christian, not to liberate the enslaved. And it matters a great deal that early antislavery schemes tried to discourage the expansion of slavery within the empire rather than to eradicate slavery throughout it. To write of a singular antislavery movement is, for these early years, to obscure the great variety of ambitions and programs that took shape in the era of the American Revolution.

A final theme of this book relates to the sources and character of personal commitment, to the peculiar features of the few in Britain who allowed antislavery to become, during the 1780s, essential to their sense of self. To an extent, the explanations must be as individual as the individuals themselves. And it is true, as well, that the singularly committed took on the antislavery cause for several of the reasons others did, because they disliked what slavery did to colonial societies or to national honor. But for some of the organizers, abolitionism represented more than this. For some it allowed for the creation and elaboration of an innovative Christian politics, for which, at the time, they could find few other outlets. It offered an opportunity to make piety relevant in an age that seemed to some devout men and women too respectful of the secular, too enamored with the joys of polite diversions. It has become customary to characterize British antislavery opinion in the late eighteenth century as an amalgam of secular principles and religious doctrine. If this description suits the public culture of antislavery as a whole, it is off the mark for the few who made antislavery a substantive political question. The British antislavery movement emerged from a religious reaction against what its Evangelical and Quaker founders derided as nominal Christianity. The initiators of the campaign, in most instances, came to the cause from a more general dedication to making religion figure more prominently in private and public life, although they were influenced by the eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural trends that questioned the ethics of slaving, although they quickly won support from men and women hostile to Evangelicalism and dubious about the defense of the established order. If the British antislavery movement, by the 1790s, became associated with political and religious radicalism, it emerged from a concerted attempt to restore the moral authority of Church and State or, more broadly, to rehabilitate the reputation of piety and the personal commitment to faith. Scholars have long understood that the antislavery movement provided moral capital for the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, but they have not always appreciated how changing perceptions of what antislavery organizing could mean would prove crucial to the prospects for the antislavery movement itself.

For an antislavery movement to develop in Britain, then, four things had to happen. In the first place, the enslavement of Africans had to be considered, in the abstract, a moral wrong. Second, that moral wrong had to attain political significance; it had to attract sustained interest and become a cause for concern. Third, those concerned needed a way to act, a way to address the concerns that had emerged. And, fourth, specific individuals and groups had to make a confrontation with the slave system a personal and collective mission, a priority that lasted beyond initial protests and could sustain itself with coherent organization and institutional commitment. The four parts of this study treat each of these developments in turn. The first is concerned with antislavery without abolitionism, the ways antislavery ideas could and did exist without generating comprehensive antislavery initiatives. The second part of the book then tracks the circumstances that made the British slave system the subject of political controversy. Here my discussion centers on the politics of the American Revolution and how the experience of that conflict reshaped perceptions of the slave trade, slavery, empire, and antislavery opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in the British Isles. Part 3 of the book turns to the search for solutions, to early attempts to solve the problem of slavery, and the obstacles that prevented those solutions from generating a sustained campaign for reform. The book then closes, in its fourth part, with a sustained consideration of the Quaker and Evangelical organizers and how abolitionism came to serve the more specific concerns of these groups in the years after the American war.

As should be apparent from this brief outline, readers may expect to find little here regarding the social history of colonial slavery or its economic progress during the eighteenth century. My concern in this volume is less with these social and economic facts than with how colonial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade were experienced, perceived, understood, and discussed by those who attacked it. For related reasons, I have devoted relatively little space to slave resistance in the plantation colonies, except as it pertains to its frequently substantial influence on British antislavery opinion and initiative. This is not because the topic is unimportant. To the contrary, the subject of slave resistance is essential and fundamental to the broader history of slavery, abolition, and emancipation. But the causes of slave resistance do not seem particularly mysterious; at least they do not to me. I have not thought it necessary to elaborate at length on why enslaved Africans opposed slavery. By contrast, attacks on human bondage by British men and women, who were not slaves and who benefited from slavery either directly or indirectly, present problems of a rather different order. They raise complicated questions about motivation and aim, timing and purpose. And yet it is just this aspect of these choices—unexpected, unlikely, and historically specific—that has either eluded or been neglected by too many historians of British antislavery. So I have concentrated my energies on those activists whom I found difficult to understand not only to make sense of their particular choices but also to emphasize their peculiar character. For too long, since Thomas Clarkson’s time, the antislavery movement in Britain has been treated as a natural consequence of late-eighteenth-century trends, as if, in this era, organizing against the slave trade was an obvious and logical thing to do. This book proceeds from a different set of assumptions. It proposes that, viewed historically, antislavery organizing was odd rather than inevitable, a peculiar institution rather than the inevitable outcome of moral and cultural progress. It will become clear, I hope, that in key respects the British antislavery movement was a historical accident, a contingent event that just as easily might never have occurred. In any case, my aim here is to make better sense of the first abolitionists, to understand more clearly why particular individuals and groups in Britain thought an attack on slavery not only the right thing to do but something that they could choose to do.

Notes

1. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1808), I, 262.

2. Ibid., 27, 28, 263, 264–265.

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, [February 1808], in Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. (London, 1932), I, 395. See also Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (London, 1998), 141–143, and Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford, 2002), 222–228.

4. John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883), ed. John Gross (London, 1971), 109; British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Sixty Years against Slavery: A Brief Record of the Work and Aims of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1839–1899; with an Article on the Abolition of the Legal Status of Slavery by Joseph F. Alexander (London, 1900), 3. For Seeley and the development of imperial history as a subdiscipline in the early twentieth century, see Peter Burroughs, John Robert Seeley and British Imperial History, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, I, no. 2 (1973), 191–211; J. G. Greenlee, ‘A Succession of Seeleys’: The ‘Old School’ Re-examined, ibid., IV, no. 3 (1976), 266–282; John L. Herkless, Seeley and Ranke, Historian, XLIII (1980), 1–22; Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980), 154–180; and Robin A. Butlin, Historical Geographies of the British Empire, c. 1887–1925, in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan, eds., Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940 (Manchester, Eng., 1995), 151–188. James Walvin captures British complacency and self-satisfaction with respect to slavery in the mid-nineteenth century in Freedom and Slavery and the Shaping of Victorian Britain, Slavery and Abolition, XV, no. 2 (August 1994), 246–259; see also P. J. Marshall, Imperial Britain, Jour. Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., XXIII, no. 3 (1995), 389–392. For scholarly accounts published in the first half of the twentieth century that were inclined to celebrate the British achievement, see Frank J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism (New Haven, Conn., 1926); Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (1933; rpt. New York, 1964); Reginald Coupland, The Abolition of the Slave Trade, in J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, and E. A. Benians, eds., The Cambridge History of the British Empire, 8 vols. (Cambridge, 1929–1959; rpt. Cambridge, 1961), II, 188–216, 188 (the old commercialism); and George Radcliffe Mellor, British Imperial Trusteeship, 1783–1850 (London, 1951).

5. For Coupland’s career in politics as well as in history, see J. D. Fage, Introduction to the Second Edition, in Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement, ix–xvii; Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (New York, 1986), 53–55; Ronald Edward Robinson, Oxford in Imperial Historiography, in Frederick Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse, eds., Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams (London, 1982), 36–38; and W[illia]m Roger Louis, Introduction, in Robin W. Winks, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, V, Historiography (Oxford, 1999), 23–24. The celebrations of 1933 marking the one-hundred-year anniversary of emancipation have yet to receive extended study. They are described in brief by David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford, 1984), 279–281, and by Seymour Drescher, The Historical Context of British Abolition, in David Richardson, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916 (London, 1985), 3–4. The centenary publications include Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement; John Harris, A Century of Emancipation (London, 1933); Sir Maurice Watts, Liberty to the Captives: A Short Account of the Movement to Abolish Slavery (London, 1933); and C. M. MacInnes, England and Slavery (Bristol, 1934), citation on 211.

6. Patricia Hollis, Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone, Kent, Eng., 1980), 294–315; Douglas A. Lorimer, Color, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester, 1978), 94–95; Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago, 1985), 3–10; Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography, 151–169, 178–180.

7. Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, XL (December 1849), 670–679; Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (London, 1859); James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses (London, 1888); Elsa V. Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the Nineteenth Century (Mexico City, 1956), 102–107, 110–113, 127–134, 152–156; Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (1964; rpt. New York, 1994), 38–52, 64–94; Lorimer, Color, Class, and the Victorians, 113–114, 116, 119–124; Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (Baltimore, 1983), 119–122; Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the River Niger, 1841–1842 (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 60–62, 161–162, 166; Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford, 2002), 161, 167, 176–177, 180–182, 190–191, 210, 217–222; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002), 209, 212, 214–217, 222–223, 347–352, 358–360; Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography, 346–397.

8. Lawrence C. Jennings, French Reaction to British Slave Emancipation (Baton Rouge, La., 1988), 85–87, 148–167; Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1818–48: Diplomacy, Morality, and Economics (New York, 2000); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (Oxford, 2001), 163–169; Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin, Tex., 1967), 28; David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1980), 147–148; Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge, 1970), 65; Robert Edgar Conrad, Economics and Ideals: The British Antislavery Crusade Reconsidered, Indian Historical Review, XV (1988–1989), 214–216. The international controversy produced by slave trade suppression policies is documented helpfully in Peter C. Hogg, ed., The African Slave Trade and Its Suppression: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Periodical Articles (London, 1973), 200–244.

9. The outlines of this story have now been told several times. Seymour Drescher, Eric Williams: British Capitalism and British Slavery, History and Theory, XXVI (1987), 180–196; Howard Temperley, Eric Williams and Abolition: The Birth of a New Orthodoxy, and Richard B. Sheridan, Eric Williams and Capitalism and Slavery: A Biographical and Historiographical Essay, both in Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge, 1987), 229–257, 317–345; Paul Sutton, The Historian as Politician: Eric Williams and Walter Rodney, in Alistair Hennessy, ed., Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century Caribbean, I, Spectre of the New Class: The Commonwealth Caribbean (London, 1992), 98–105; Colin Palmer, introduction to Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; rpt. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), xi–xxi; Palmer, Eric Williams and His Intellectual Legacy, in Heather Cateau and S. H. H. Carrington, eds., Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams—A Reassessment of the Man and His Work (New York, 2000), 38–41; B. W. Higman, Writing West Indian Histories (London, 1999), 90–97. Williams himself writes movingly and informatively about his years in Oxford, where his ideas took shape. Williams, Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister (London, 1969), 43–53. For Williams’s acknowledgment of James’s influence, see Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 268. Their relationship and divergent careers are treated suggestively in Ivar Oxaal, Black